It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first mostly-windowless dorm he’s built. His previous work at UM has generally very good reviews and was built without much (if any) protest.
It sounds to me like the evidence so far is that Munger is correct, and on average people (or at least the kind of people that would sign up for res in a building like this) would rather have a small private room with a fake window and lower rent and than a shared room with a real window and higher rent. I’m not sure why this particular structure has provoked so much more outrage than the previous one.
Edit: I previously mentioned the Stanford Munger Graduate Residence as well, but it appears that one is of more “traditional” layout (and is relatively expensive). Thanks dkarp for pointing this out. I've edited it out of my comment as to not mislead.
> It sounds to me like Munger is correct, and on average people would rather have a small private room with a fake window and lower rent and than a shared room with a real window and higher rent. I’m not sure why this particular structure has provoked so much more outrage than the previous ones.
There's something that feels off about this statement. It reads much like the articles that talk about how young millennials are "choosing" to live in pod houses/tiny homes when in reality they can't afford anything better. They are forced to live in these conditions which are then normalised by authors framing it as a free choice.
This isn’t the only residence on UM campus! The rest are “normal”. And what you said doesn’t align with the good reviews the pace gets, even compared to “normal” housing.
And to be honest, we’re always going to have to “force” people into some sort of living condition. There are more people than ever going to higher education, so people will have to accept either smaller living spaces, denser construction, higher costs, or longer commutes to school - space is (unfortunately) a rival good, and giving everybody a large dorm is likely not viable.
> articles that talk about how young millennials are "choosing" to live in pod houses/tiny homes when in reality they can't afford anything better. They are forced to live in these conditions
"conditions"? 1 in 20 UC students is homeless [1] and they want to a build a 5,000 single occupancy rooms for 1.5 Billion. But somehow everyone and their mother finds a reason to veto new development.
As I was reading the article, I started thinking this guy was right. At university, I would often have to get to a lab or whatever early in the morning and then get home late at night. I would have this sort of routine for weeks or months at a time. I may as well have had no windows.
I think as long as you get out during the day, and as a student, that’s probably likely, this sort of arrangement seems to make sense. But still offends me.
I remember the stress of worrying about rent pretty clearly, especially given my room was basically a sleeping and hygiene chamber that I hardly spent time in, but still had to have for those two critical functions.
> They are forced to live in these conditions
I agree that the choice between crippling rent rates and having no access to windows is not a good one, but it seems a function of where we are economically. Base rents everywhere I've ever lived are much higher compared to minimum wage than they've been for past generations.
i see your point, minimum size rules for appartents in Ireland cause similar issues.
But I draw the line at windows. They are a basic human necessity and a fire hazard mitigation. I stayed in a hostel underground once in Liverpool, and it was aweful... I was not rich at college and shared crappy houses all the while, but I would not take this up under any circumstances.
Looking at pictures online, the Stanford one seems to have windows.
The Michigan one doesn't have windows in the bedroom, but does have windows in the apartment (shared kitchen/living room of 7 bedrooms, i.e., common area.).[1][2]
The 3d render of the apartment in this article doesn't have any windows at all, anywhere! The windows in common areas they seem to be talking about are study spaces outside the apartment.
OK, I found an article with a floorplan[1]. This thing is not at all comparable to the Michigan dorms. Recall, in the Michigan dorms you have an apartment housing 7 people with a spacious, well-lit living room (6 windows, but the count isn't important.) Sure, you don't have a window in your bedroom, and that sucks, but to see the sun you just go through that one door.
But in this proposed building? Look at that insane floor plan[2]! It looks like a maze! If you're in one of those inner rooms, you exit your bedroom (no windows) into your apartment's common area (no windows), exit that to a long corridor that eventually leads to your "House's" common area, which finally has windows. But is the opposite way from the building's exit.
The Michigan building houses just 630 graduate students who chose to live there. Over 98% of students live elsewhere. How does that show most people prefer it?
The bedrooms are much larger. They have individual bathrooms. And a number of reviews said at least the suites have windows. UCSB's wouldn't.
> or at least the kind of people that would sign up for res in a building like this
You added this later. It's tautological. And often undergraduate students don't get to choose their building.
Yeah, IIRC I lived in (that) Munger for a year, and had a large, windowed bedroom and bathroom to myself. My 3 roommates had the same, and we shared a living room and kitchen. Not really anything like this new building.
>I’m not sure why this particular structure has provoked so much more outrage than the previous ones.
Nobody heard about the building in Michigan, so nobody talked about it. Also, in Ann Arbor it's very likely that the CoL is not so high that students are de facto forced to tolerate these conditions.
It's not really Munger who's the villain here, he instead plays the role of an enabler. There's no inherent reason that housing costs should be so high that students have to live in these awful boxes, it's because of the policies chosen by the City of Santa Barbara. For context, the population density in SB is about a quarter of that in SF.
What's outrageous is that students pay the price in mental health and fire safety for housing policy that benefits the well-off and well-connected seeking aesthetics and investment returns. What motivates people to comment is the implied risk of this callous abuse of construction restrictions ("zoning") being extended to other vulnerable populations.
If anyone is bored at work, here's a long discussion podcast that dives pretty deep into the architecture of Munger Hall (unloving dubbed 'the Cube' by locals):
As a point of reference, many hotels in China have windowless rooms. I wouldn't want to live in one, but, for a short stay I actually preferred it. There was much less noise in these "internal rooms". Normal rooms usually get a lot of street noise.
True, but you need the air inflow, and no windows suggests forced ventilation, which is still noise pollution (to my experience it can be very noisy, owing to both fans and engines).
Just feels like its presented as undergraduate accommodation comes with either a shared room or a window. which is complete BS. I don't think this would even be allowed to be built in a lot of Europe.
Munger is one of the most expensive residence halls at Stanford. The rooms are quite spacious compared to EV and Rains, and all the finishes are much nicer.
Interesting, but also not a perfect guide since that UK median wealth is mostly held in more expensive housing, which parents of university-age kids are often still paying mortgages on, and the students will take longer still to own
And US university education itself is much more expensive. Genuinely bizarre how when something often costs six figures, shared bedrooms are the norm and eliminating windows is seen as a viable alternative. Still, you have better college sports teams I guess...
I would have eagerly accepted a windowless room for myself rather than having a roommate my first year in college, and I know my roommate would have been much better off without having to share a room with a jackass like I was when I was 18.
My children each suffered in different ways from being forced to share a bedroom with someone when they entered college as well.
In my completely layman opinion, I think that the shared living space with private bedroom (even windowless) is a sensible compromise that will result in a better quality of life for the students there.
He's exaggerating (or maybe it's the case at UCSB), since it's usually only true for first year undergraduate (among "traditional" students starting right high school. I think older students usually live off campus). As for relationships, most people end their high school relationship before college, or the two go to a different college, so it's long distance.
I actually found it formative to be forced to share that space and resolve (inevitable) tensions that arise. And since it's usually randomized, you end up with someone you might not have normally met. Of course some people have bad experiences, and can request re-assignment.
When I was an undergraduate in Oklahoma in the early 2000s, Freshmen had to share dorms but after that one could pay extra to not share the room, although the bathroom was still shared. However, when I was at USC for my MS housing was extremely limited and while there were a handful of single-person dorms, almost everyone had 2+ person setups and even then it was like winning a lottery ticket to get any on campus housing at all. Later during my PhD at UCSD, it was again enormously difficult to get any on campus housing and I had roommates in campus housing for 6 years. There wasn't another option.
Maybe things have changed, but when I was an undergraduate in Oklahoma in the early 2000s
I'd say I got similar benefits living on a shared corridor (single kitchen, bathroom, etc. between 8 individual bedrooms). Sharing a bedroom still just seems bizarre.
It's bullshit. Your own dorm room is not "unheard of" in the US. Depends on the school. Undergrad freshmen almost always have a roommate, and seniors almost never.
My undergrad experience: by policy, freshmen had roommates, sophomores and above lived alone unless they wanted a roommate.
Yeah I always thought this was a reasonably big difference with the US. What if you don't get along with your roommate? I'm all for communal living as a student, but you need some kind of space that's only yours, even if it's quite small.
Btw some of the London unis do make people share. At least one friend plus my wife were having to share. Drives people nuts, especially if the other person has some issue like snoring or excessive partying.
Some universities in the US have apartments instead of dorms at least. I went to UT Dallas (graduated 2007), where they have apartments. Freshman apartments are 4-bedroom units with each student getting their own bedroom (and pairs of students sharing a bathroom), and apartments available to others are mostly 1-2 bedroom units (with each student getting their own bathroom) with a few 4-bedroom units scattered around.
With that said, I did hear that after I graduated they added dorms for freshmen, but I also heard that the dorms all had single rooms, with the only difference between the dorms and the apartments was that the dorms had communal bathrooms.
For what it's worth, I would not have gone to any school where I would've had to share a bedroom. I'm an intensely private person, and if I couldn't go to college anywhere I wouldn't have to share a bedroom I'd just have entered the workforce at 18 and continued living with my parents till I could afford to move out.
> Even in the UK, ...., every undergraduate has always gotten an individual bedroom
This is mostly true but not universal - when I was in UG accommodation in the mid-2000 it was indeed mostly individual, but there was also some small fraction of shared rooms available, that were a little cheaper than my (probably somewhat subsidised) £50/week individual room.
Yeah. In Finland these days the most common mode of student living is an individual studio. Sharing the same flat (common kitchen/living room, individual bedrooms) used to be more common but they’re really falling out of favor. Sharing the same bedroom? That’s just unthinkable and only happens in US movies and TV series.
I shared a room with an unrelated adult every year I was an undergraduate in the UK, and saved a lot of money in the process. Those were the days - long gone - when you could rent a room in central London for £60/week, I paid more like £30-40. Some students had 3 to a room.
When I went to school in the 90s, as a freshman, we had 3 students to a single room (at least mine). 1 bunk bed, one single bed. I remember it was normally 2 to a room but we had overcrowding issues at time time. It was fine, I didn't have any issues with my roommates, but I didn't hang out with them much either. When you're that close, you learn how to get along with anyone. We were freshman and didn't spend a lot of time in our room anyway. We would study in the library and hang out in our friend's rooms, or outside. I moved to off-campus housing after a couple of years and kinda regretted it. Our dorm was men on the bottom two floors and women on the top two floors. It was a lot of fun, I remember the time fondly.
At Cambridge we had a great compromise in the form of a "double set", in a building built in 1825: two very small private bedrooms, which share a lounge. A floor of the building had two or three of these, which then share a kitchen.
Where I went in Aberdeen, each floot had a 6 small, private bedrooms, and a shared, combined kitchen/lounge area (which was also pretty small).
I would have absolutely hated it if I'd had to share a bedroom with someone else! Aside from generally wanting my own space with privacy, how the hell is that supposed to work when you're bringing sexual partners back to your room?!
I and most people I went to school with (BYU 2007-2011) shared a room for at least part of their college years. For me, it was worth it for ~30% lower rent
Maybe college is about learning stuff and having a roomie to challenge and help you. I doubt the powers that be are worried about you wanting a long-term relationship.
Remember that people having sex while not married has only been acceptable for perhaps 50 years to society, which post-dates many colelge buildings. There might be lots of people who want to dissuade people from "illicit liasons" by pairing them up in rooms to make things harder ;-)
Not to be nit-picky, but I'd just add the caveat "having sex while not married has become fashionable in the last 50 years, after a few hundred years of Catholic puritanism"... Sex outside of marriage has been extremely acceptable in many non-western societies at basically all stages of human development.
> Obviously, it would be better if every student could have a penthouse with perfect views in all four directions. But we don't do that because we can't get enough students to live conveniently close together.
This is a logic fallacy, but I don't know the name of it. "We all agree that all students can't have a penthouse. So why do you care if we stuff them in windowless rooms?"
He wants to compare windowless rooms to a cruise ship. You spend a WEEK on a cruise ship. I had an openable window in my dorm room (in the days before every room in a university was a hotel suite). I cannot imagine living 9 months of my life in a room with no actual window.
> This is a logic fallacy, but I don't know the name of it. "We all agree that all students can't have a penthouse. So why do you care if we stuff them in windowless rooms?"
Not sure about a fallacy but he's essentially saying: because it can't be the best option, the worst is acceptable.
It's as if there aren't options in between and this isn't just optimization and greed run amuck against the human condition. It reminds me of one of the newer plane seating layouts I saw with alternating seats.
You know, it would be even more optimal if they didn't actually live in the building at all and just sent him money every week, wouldn't he like that even more?
Worst? There are multiple axes and this clearly won’t be bad on all of them:
- proximity to campus
- private bedroom
- land used / density
- windows
- furnishing
- common areas
- price
- etc
Worst would be an expensive windowless gymnasium with 200 people sleeping on cots in the same room 10 miles from campus or anything else.
Why can’t we try different combinations of that and let people self-optimize? One of the big trade-offs here is that putting every room on the exterior means making a long narrow building, which means “dead” space between builds (less density) and more exterior walls (construction cost). Light wells could maybe give you “windows” in that you could have some real sunlight, but they have zero view, privacy concerns, aren’t exits, and are much dimmer than true exterior windows. Courtyards have to be big enough to not be glorified lightwells, and they basically have the same problem as narrow buildings. We could try to build up for more density, but that comes with several more axes of trade-offs.
If everyone is saying no other building does this, maybe we should stop relying on emotion and get some actual data. It’s definitely possible that a sun-lamp window (and good ventilation, which he mentions) are fine for people. UCSB should just get a clause saying he’ll pay to tear it down after 10 years if psych studies of residents are damning, and then we have a billionaire really betting on his vision and funding an honest attempt at proving a viable alternative.
I think this line of reasoning is completely unsubstantiated. I sleep in a room with a window covered up, which I never open, and it’s just fine. Because I don’t spend my whole day in that room. Asserting that it’s some kind of a giant problem for undergrads to sleep in a windowless room, when that building has plenty of well lit common space with windows, is just absurd.
>I cannot imagine living 9 months of my life in a room with no actual window.
Why would you be spending a literal nine months of year in your little windowless dorm bedroom, though? Were you a shut-in in college? The whole point is you sleep there, maybe occasionally get a little privacy there, and otherwise live your life in the rooms that do have windows. Or alternately, venture outside occasionally.
I understand why people want a window, but people make this out to be hell on earth or something.
People are different. Some students I lived with only showed up to sleep in the dorm, you could hardly see them around. Some like me preferred to study at my own desk.
I would go crazy if I had to stay there, others would not notice lack of a window.
I am not 100% critical of the windowless room, however this should be an option and not the only option (I strongly believe that once adopted this would quickly become the de-facto only accommodation option for average student)
On the other hand, is an architecture degree the right credential to criticize the proposal? The strongest critique seems to come from the social science side with an argument that windowless rooms are bad for mental health.
I'm interested in hearing more about that, particularly whether there's a difference between windows and natural-spectrum light (the latter of which can be mimicked).
However, an architect has no particular authority on this subject. I can't give his opinion here any more weight than the manager who's hired architects before.
Architects take a lot of stuff into account when designing a building. Natural light is undoubtedly one of the considerations (and I expect them to know how important it is and why).
People that are experts in one field tend to assume they are experts in other fields.
I think this is a fundamental human flaw, rather than a personal one, because I easily make the same mistake if I’m not careful.
Of course, this belief is based on the assumption on how frequently I see it. Could be confirmation bias or me trying to write off my own problems as not being mine. :)
From go, this article is bullshit. Yes, I flagged it, and yes, it's against guidelines to say this, but no, I don't think this should be on HN's front page, and it should be flippantly dismissed.
Briefly, the article is an opinion piece crafted to stoke outrage. It is crafted to make you stupider. It does not give you full access to all the information for you to make your own informed opinion about what's going on. It is clickbait, and not worthy of your attention.
The article includes a quick recap on the situation, an interview where the designer defends their concept, renders of what the rooms would look like, and a link to the actual, 80-pages-long proposal in PDF. I think that's more than enough.
More to the point: I followed their link to the proposal, saw what a typical residential floor plan would look like (page 59), I contrasted them with the reasons the guy gave for this design, and I now agree with the "prison for students" comments. So they did provide me with full access to all the information for me to make my own informed opinion.
The subtitle, "Charles Munger says artificial windows are, in some ways, 'actually better' than the real deal", is a bit misleading and obviously to stoke outrage.
However it's not an article. It's a transcribed interview that you can listen to at the top. I listened to it and their editing doesn't change the sentiment of his responses in my opinion.
The dorms look amazing provided they're at the right price. And since there are so many of them, I can guarantee the price will be right.
I don't know who "this billionaire" is, but he is definitely 100% right here. Dorms in Asian cities are like this and they're a godsend for students, workers, etc. for inner city, affordable and temporary living.
Arguably articles should be taken more on their ability to provide a relevant place for a particular discussion on HN, rather than the quality of article itself. This was a topic I was interested in and wanted to see what the HN demographic thought about it, so for that reason alone it's a 'good' post if enough people share that perspective.
Its not mentioned at all in this article, not sure why, but in construction, every state has a building code, and specifically every state has a requirement for a window to be built inside of each sleeping room for egress fire safety. I would question how this would pass any plan review, not to mention inspection [1] [2]
I've never seen an apartment complex that had bedrooms in it that didn't have any windows... I have built apartment buildings and they need to have sprinklers (circa 2010) but more importantly they need to have Windows... the cost savings is probably null considering that you're going to be filling the space with concrete, and when the fire happens, which they do, you'll probably get sued into
bankruptcy by anybody living in such a building with no windows.
From what I understand you're not even allowed to have an interior room that's a sleeping quarters that doesn't have a window, and if anybody found out that you were doing that it would get shut down immediately.
Relatedly, an outside window isn't going to be very useful for egress when you're in a high-rise. No, this particular dorm isn't quite a high-rise, but the point is that exceptions are entirely necessary and legitimate. This aspect of building codes probably wasn't mentioned because it's not relevant.
This dorm really is an abomination and the correct response here would've been for the university to say "thanks, but no thanks" to Munger's money with the stipulations he placed on it.
In following this story someone raised the comparison to University of Cincinnati's Sander Hall [1], which was actually less crowded than this. This now demolished building had problems from criminal offences to evacuations caused by people intentionally setting off fire alarms.
Evacuating this dorm in such cases is going to be a nightmare given the ratio of students to fire stairs and you know that's going to happen.
Architecture matters. The experience matters. Common areas, such as they are, with this many students will undoubtedly turn feral almost immediately. Putting people in windowless cells but defending it as "everyone gets their own room" is not the solution.
Billionaires reach an age when the only thing they value is putting their name on everything. It's why there are so many concert halls, colleges, etc named "Carnegie" (after Andrew Carnegie, the 19th century steel industrialist). You don't have to take their money. I'm sure UCSB isn't struggling for cash.
Needs pointing out: You are asserting stuff like "This dorm really is an abomination" and "Common areas, such as they are, with this many students will undoubtedly turn feral almost immediately" with out actually seeming to support your arguments.
This comes off as hyperbolic and biased, and more likely, some combination of thoughtlessness and arrogance which makes the opposing view seem more honest.
Your reference to a 50 year old dorm in another state, with a completely different layout and a culture more informed by the film Animal House than Instagram hardly bears up. The building is shorter with more space for emergency exits. It may well have integrated fire suppression and active monitoring. And each of these sleeping spaces with no windows is said to attach to a 'house' with a private common area and real windows. Nothing like the isolated skyscraper dorm you link to.
Moreover, touchy feely points like "Architecture matters. The experience matters." only raise red flags for me, especially when considered with your next point:
"Billionaires reach an age when the only thing they value is putting their name on everything."
This particular billionaire clearly has an enthusiastic engagement with the details of the project and a vision for solving the problems he's mentioned in the article, namely removing the need for freshmen to lodge with a stranger.
A billionaire that just wanted to "put their name on everything" would pay the money, let the architect do their thing and never consider what it would be like to live in the results, right? This guy seems to be trying to fix the complaints from his eight(!) children, so future generations don't face the same.
You might have a point buried in your post somewhere, but in your rush to slam this whole thing without backing it up, you've lost me.
> each of these sleeping spaces with no windows is said to attach to a 'house' with a private common area and real windows. Nothing like the isolated skyscraper dorm you link to.
Yeah, but not quite. First, these "sleeping spaces with no windows" are apartments, a cluster of 7 single-occupancy bedrooms, with a common area in the middle, with kitchenette, shared bathrooms, etc. It's a self-contained unit. And most of these units have no windows at all.
8 of these units form a "house", with a large common area and real windows, as you see. But it's a space shared by 56 people, and their guests. Calling it private is rather stretching that term.
From the floor plan linked elsewhere in this thread, I count ten stairwells spaced around the perimeter of the building, which would imply a ratio of about 450 residents per stairwell.
I like the design in principle, is there actual evidence for or against the idea of sleeping in a room with fake windows? I have a light based alarm clock that wakes me up, which is a vaguely similar concept, I've also used blackout blinds to block light from real windows in summer.
I think there are far better criticisms of the building than the fake windows. Like sharing a single shower with 7 other people who might take the same courses as me. Or how there's way too few entrances and exits.
It's strange how this interview with Munger completely focuses on the windows, the one concern that's both unavoidable in the design and addressed in the planning (by putting in fake windows)
Personally, I think just knowing that is not real I’d enough to make me lose it if I had to live in a room like that. There’s something magical about waking up to the smell of the cool, morning air to me that I would desperately miss.
As long as there's ventilation I'd prefer it. I have double curtains full time but not having windows for light to peak through would appeal to me even more.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038356
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first mostly-windowless dorm he’s built. His previous work at UM has generally very good reviews and was built without much (if any) protest.
Michigan: https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
It sounds to me like the evidence so far is that Munger is correct, and on average people (or at least the kind of people that would sign up for res in a building like this) would rather have a small private room with a fake window and lower rent and than a shared room with a real window and higher rent. I’m not sure why this particular structure has provoked so much more outrage than the previous one.
Edit: I previously mentioned the Stanford Munger Graduate Residence as well, but it appears that one is of more “traditional” layout (and is relatively expensive). Thanks dkarp for pointing this out. I've edited it out of my comment as to not mislead.
There's something that feels off about this statement. It reads much like the articles that talk about how young millennials are "choosing" to live in pod houses/tiny homes when in reality they can't afford anything better. They are forced to live in these conditions which are then normalised by authors framing it as a free choice.
And to be honest, we’re always going to have to “force” people into some sort of living condition. There are more people than ever going to higher education, so people will have to accept either smaller living spaces, denser construction, higher costs, or longer commutes to school - space is (unfortunately) a rival good, and giving everybody a large dorm is likely not viable.
"conditions"? 1 in 20 UC students is homeless [1] and they want to a build a 5,000 single occupancy rooms for 1.5 Billion. But somehow everyone and their mother finds a reason to veto new development.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-02/what-crit...
I think as long as you get out during the day, and as a student, that’s probably likely, this sort of arrangement seems to make sense. But still offends me.
> They are forced to live in these conditions
I agree that the choice between crippling rent rates and having no access to windows is not a good one, but it seems a function of where we are economically. Base rents everywhere I've ever lived are much higher compared to minimum wage than they've been for past generations.
In reality half the people get a massive debt burden and the other half live off-campus, but the complainers don’t really see that part.
See also: people who are vehemently opposed to building more density, because a detached house with a large yard is better for mental health
But I draw the line at windows. They are a basic human necessity and a fire hazard mitigation. I stayed in a hostel underground once in Liverpool, and it was aweful... I was not rich at college and shared crappy houses all the while, but I would not take this up under any circumstances.
The Michigan one doesn't have windows in the bedroom, but does have windows in the apartment (shared kitchen/living room of 7 bedrooms, i.e., common area.).[1][2]
The 3d render of the apartment in this article doesn't have any windows at all, anywhere! The windows in common areas they seem to be talking about are study spaces outside the apartment.
[1] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iRaug6kB14 [2] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtkALW6Q2_A
But in this proposed building? Look at that insane floor plan[2]! It looks like a maze! If you're in one of those inner rooms, you exit your bedroom (no windows) into your apartment's common area (no windows), exit that to a long corridor that eventually leads to your "House's" common area, which finally has windows. But is the opposite way from the building's exit.
Yeah this thing is insane.
[1] https://www.dezeen.com/2021/11/02/architect-resigns-grotesqu... [2] https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2021/11/munger-hall-univer...
The bedrooms are much larger. They have individual bathrooms. And a number of reviews said at least the suites have windows. UCSB's wouldn't.
> or at least the kind of people that would sign up for res in a building like this
You added this later. It's tautological. And often undergraduate students don't get to choose their building.
[0] https://rde.stanford.edu/studenthousing/munger-graduate-resi...
Nobody heard about the building in Michigan, so nobody talked about it. Also, in Ann Arbor it's very likely that the CoL is not so high that students are de facto forced to tolerate these conditions.
It's not really Munger who's the villain here, he instead plays the role of an enabler. There's no inherent reason that housing costs should be so high that students have to live in these awful boxes, it's because of the policies chosen by the City of Santa Barbara. For context, the population density in SB is about a quarter of that in SF.
What's outrageous is that students pay the price in mental health and fire safety for housing policy that benefits the well-off and well-connected seeking aesthetics and investment returns. What motivates people to comment is the implied risk of this callous abuse of construction restrictions ("zoning") being extended to other vulnerable populations.
Looking at the layout it is positively dystopian.
People will say they feel a private room is better, but that’s no guarantee that it actually is.
Conversely, we have a lot of research showing that natural light brings all kind of benefits.
https://youtu.be/4grR3qoSV90
My initial reaction was to react against a windowless dorm room layout. But you make some good points.
What I still don’t get is why insist on such few egress paths and emergency exits?
Do you know if they are piping in some natural sunlight to the interior?
Even in the UK, which is a lot poorer than the US, every undergraduate has always gotten an individual bedroom.
The idea of making adults share bedrooms is very bizarre. How do you have a relationship living like that?
[1] https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...
And US university education itself is much more expensive. Genuinely bizarre how when something often costs six figures, shared bedrooms are the norm and eliminating windows is seen as a viable alternative. Still, you have better college sports teams I guess...
My children each suffered in different ways from being forced to share a bedroom with someone when they entered college as well.
In my completely layman opinion, I think that the shared living space with private bedroom (even windowless) is a sensible compromise that will result in a better quality of life for the students there.
I actually found it formative to be forced to share that space and resolve (inevitable) tensions that arise. And since it's usually randomized, you end up with someone you might not have normally met. Of course some people have bad experiences, and can request re-assignment.
When I was an undergraduate in Oklahoma in the early 2000s, Freshmen had to share dorms but after that one could pay extra to not share the room, although the bathroom was still shared. However, when I was at USC for my MS housing was extremely limited and while there were a handful of single-person dorms, almost everyone had 2+ person setups and even then it was like winning a lottery ticket to get any on campus housing at all. Later during my PhD at UCSD, it was again enormously difficult to get any on campus housing and I had roommates in campus housing for 6 years. There wasn't another option. Maybe things have changed, but when I was an undergraduate in Oklahoma in the early 2000s
My undergrad experience: by policy, freshmen had roommates, sophomores and above lived alone unless they wanted a roommate.
Btw some of the London unis do make people share. At least one friend plus my wife were having to share. Drives people nuts, especially if the other person has some issue like snoring or excessive partying.
With that said, I did hear that after I graduated they added dorms for freshmen, but I also heard that the dorms all had single rooms, with the only difference between the dorms and the apartments was that the dorms had communal bathrooms.
For what it's worth, I would not have gone to any school where I would've had to share a bedroom. I'm an intensely private person, and if I couldn't go to college anywhere I wouldn't have to share a bedroom I'd just have entered the workforce at 18 and continued living with my parents till I could afford to move out.
This is mostly true but not universal - when I was in UG accommodation in the mid-2000 it was indeed mostly individual, but there was also some small fraction of shared rooms available, that were a little cheaper than my (probably somewhat subsidised) £50/week individual room.
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I would have absolutely hated it if I'd had to share a bedroom with someone else! Aside from generally wanting my own space with privacy, how the hell is that supposed to work when you're bringing sexual partners back to your room?!
True, but if you're asking why anyone would put up with that -- it has something to do with money.
Remember that people having sex while not married has only been acceptable for perhaps 50 years to society, which post-dates many colelge buildings. There might be lots of people who want to dissuade people from "illicit liasons" by pairing them up in rooms to make things harder ;-)
Learn with, challenge, and help you… in the bedroom?!
You don’t need to sleep and get undressed in the same room as someone to study with them.
> I doubt the powers that be are worried about you wanting a long-term relationship.
When I was at Uni they made a big deal about how many people met their future partners there.
> Obviously, it would be better if every student could have a penthouse with perfect views in all four directions. But we don't do that because we can't get enough students to live conveniently close together.
This is a logic fallacy, but I don't know the name of it. "We all agree that all students can't have a penthouse. So why do you care if we stuff them in windowless rooms?"
He wants to compare windowless rooms to a cruise ship. You spend a WEEK on a cruise ship. I had an openable window in my dorm room (in the days before every room in a university was a hotel suite). I cannot imagine living 9 months of my life in a room with no actual window.
False dichotomy
> Exaggerating (sometimes grossly exaggerating) an opponent's argument, then attacking this exaggerated version.
The claim in this case being, "residents should have reasonable access to sunlight in their rooms." And the exaggeration being penthouses.
It's as if there aren't options in between and this isn't just optimization and greed run amuck against the human condition. It reminds me of one of the newer plane seating layouts I saw with alternating seats.
You know, it would be even more optimal if they didn't actually live in the building at all and just sent him money every week, wouldn't he like that even more?
Why can’t we try different combinations of that and let people self-optimize? One of the big trade-offs here is that putting every room on the exterior means making a long narrow building, which means “dead” space between builds (less density) and more exterior walls (construction cost). Light wells could maybe give you “windows” in that you could have some real sunlight, but they have zero view, privacy concerns, aren’t exits, and are much dimmer than true exterior windows. Courtyards have to be big enough to not be glorified lightwells, and they basically have the same problem as narrow buildings. We could try to build up for more density, but that comes with several more axes of trade-offs.
If everyone is saying no other building does this, maybe we should stop relying on emotion and get some actual data. It’s definitely possible that a sun-lamp window (and good ventilation, which he mentions) are fine for people. UCSB should just get a clause saying he’ll pay to tear it down after 10 years if psych studies of residents are damning, and then we have a billionaire really betting on his vision and funding an honest attempt at proving a viable alternative.
This building is a huge improvement over that baseline.
Why would you be spending a literal nine months of year in your little windowless dorm bedroom, though? Were you a shut-in in college? The whole point is you sleep there, maybe occasionally get a little privacy there, and otherwise live your life in the rooms that do have windows. Or alternately, venture outside occasionally.
I understand why people want a window, but people make this out to be hell on earth or something.
People are different. Some students I lived with only showed up to sleep in the dorm, you could hardly see them around. Some like me preferred to study at my own desk.
I would go crazy if I had to stay there, others would not notice lack of a window.
I am not 100% critical of the windowless room, however this should be an option and not the only option (I strongly believe that once adopted this would quickly become the de-facto only accommodation option for average student)
> Well, no, but I've been building buildings all my life, and I've hired a lot of the very eminent architects for over 70 years.
This sounds like a manager with no technical skills says they hired a lot of programmers before.
I'm interested in hearing more about that, particularly whether there's a difference between windows and natural-spectrum light (the latter of which can be mimicked).
However, an architect has no particular authority on this subject. I can't give his opinion here any more weight than the manager who's hired architects before.
I think this is a fundamental human flaw, rather than a personal one, because I easily make the same mistake if I’m not careful.
Of course, this belief is based on the assumption on how frequently I see it. Could be confirmation bias or me trying to write off my own problems as not being mine. :)
Briefly, the article is an opinion piece crafted to stoke outrage. It is crafted to make you stupider. It does not give you full access to all the information for you to make your own informed opinion about what's going on. It is clickbait, and not worthy of your attention.
More to the point: I followed their link to the proposal, saw what a typical residential floor plan would look like (page 59), I contrasted them with the reasons the guy gave for this design, and I now agree with the "prison for students" comments. So they did provide me with full access to all the information for me to make my own informed opinion.
Content: Quotes from billionaire defending his windowless dorm design
How is that clickbait?
However it's not an article. It's a transcribed interview that you can listen to at the top. I listened to it and their editing doesn't change the sentiment of his responses in my opinion.
I don't know who "this billionaire" is, but he is definitely 100% right here. Dorms in Asian cities are like this and they're a godsend for students, workers, etc. for inner city, affordable and temporary living.
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[1] https://www.buildingincalifornia.com/wp-content/uploads/2014...
[2] https://up.codes/viewer/california/ibc-2018/chapter/10/means...
From your second link, that window requirement does not apply to type R.2 buildings (apartments) where there is an automatic sprinkler system.
From what I understand you're not even allowed to have an interior room that's a sleeping quarters that doesn't have a window, and if anybody found out that you were doing that it would get shut down immediately.
In following this story someone raised the comparison to University of Cincinnati's Sander Hall [1], which was actually less crowded than this. This now demolished building had problems from criminal offences to evacuations caused by people intentionally setting off fire alarms.
Evacuating this dorm in such cases is going to be a nightmare given the ratio of students to fire stairs and you know that's going to happen.
Architecture matters. The experience matters. Common areas, such as they are, with this many students will undoubtedly turn feral almost immediately. Putting people in windowless cells but defending it as "everyone gets their own room" is not the solution.
Billionaires reach an age when the only thing they value is putting their name on everything. It's why there are so many concert halls, colleges, etc named "Carnegie" (after Andrew Carnegie, the 19th century steel industrialist). You don't have to take their money. I'm sure UCSB isn't struggling for cash.
[1]: https://medium.com/@spncrtckrmn/the-rise-and-demise-of-ucs-s...
This comes off as hyperbolic and biased, and more likely, some combination of thoughtlessness and arrogance which makes the opposing view seem more honest.
Your reference to a 50 year old dorm in another state, with a completely different layout and a culture more informed by the film Animal House than Instagram hardly bears up. The building is shorter with more space for emergency exits. It may well have integrated fire suppression and active monitoring. And each of these sleeping spaces with no windows is said to attach to a 'house' with a private common area and real windows. Nothing like the isolated skyscraper dorm you link to.
Moreover, touchy feely points like "Architecture matters. The experience matters." only raise red flags for me, especially when considered with your next point:
"Billionaires reach an age when the only thing they value is putting their name on everything."
This particular billionaire clearly has an enthusiastic engagement with the details of the project and a vision for solving the problems he's mentioned in the article, namely removing the need for freshmen to lodge with a stranger.
A billionaire that just wanted to "put their name on everything" would pay the money, let the architect do their thing and never consider what it would be like to live in the results, right? This guy seems to be trying to fix the complaints from his eight(!) children, so future generations don't face the same.
You might have a point buried in your post somewhere, but in your rush to slam this whole thing without backing it up, you've lost me.
This is supposedly the floor plan: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2021/11/munger-hall-univer...
> each of these sleeping spaces with no windows is said to attach to a 'house' with a private common area and real windows. Nothing like the isolated skyscraper dorm you link to.
Yeah, but not quite. First, these "sleeping spaces with no windows" are apartments, a cluster of 7 single-occupancy bedrooms, with a common area in the middle, with kitchenette, shared bathrooms, etc. It's a self-contained unit. And most of these units have no windows at all.
8 of these units form a "house", with a large common area and real windows, as you see. But it's a space shared by 56 people, and their guests. Calling it private is rather stretching that term.
It's strange how this interview with Munger completely focuses on the windows, the one concern that's both unavoidable in the design and addressed in the planning (by putting in fake windows)
Are shared bathrooms really that big a deal?